President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats proudly promised that their $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan would create millions of new jobs this year.

For example, on February 3, White House economists issued their take on the American Rescue Plan, stating: “Moody’s Analytics projects that the President’s Plan will bring the economy to full employment a full year earlier than a baseline without additional fiscal stimulus. This is significant because it’s a difference of 4 million jobs in 2021.” Congressional Democrats followed suit, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi stating on February 26 during House debate on the legislation that “if we do not enact this package, the results could be catastrophic,” including “4 million fewer jobs.” And the day after he signed the plan into law, on March 12 President Biden dialed up the job creation claims, suggesting that “by the end of this year, this law alone will create 7 million new jobs. (Applause.) Seven million.”

So how are those job-creation promises working out?

With this morning’s disappointing jobs report, it now appears likely that job creation in the wake of the American Rescue Plan will not even match the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) projection for job creation this year without it. That is, the legislation has yet to create the first of the millions of new jobs supporters promised it would.

On February 1, 2021, CBO released a report projecting that monthly job growth this year (specifically, the change in payroll employment between the fourth quarter of 2020 and 2021) would average 521,000 — without enactment of the American Rescue Plan. That “baseline without additional stimulus” would result in a gain of 6.252 million jobs over 12 months. Meanwhile, payroll employment averaged 142.619 million in the fourth quarter of 2020, suggesting average payroll employment in the fourth quarter of 2021 would have to reach 148.871 million to match CBO’s projection without the American Rescue Plan.

We now have two months of data for the fourth quarter of 2021 — October and November. If next month’s jobs report for December matches the average monthly change in payroll employment so far in 2021 (that is, 555,000 jobs), then payroll employment in the fourth quarter of 2021 will average 148.726 million. Compared with the fourth quarter of 2020, that would be an increase of 6.107 million — or less than the 6.252 million gain CBO projected without the American Rescue Plan. December job growth would have to be 990,000 — a level reached just once this year and triple November’s level counting revisions — just to match CBO’s projection. Again, that would be without creating a single one of the four million — much less seven million — jobs “this law alone will create,” as the president put it in March.

When they issued their February 3 estimates for job creation from the American Rescue Plan, White House economists said the baseline for job creation “the CBO is projecting is dire . . . and a call to immediate action, not calm, not wait-and-see.” Yet it now appears more likely than not that the White House’s $1.9 trillion “action” will be followed by even fewer jobs than the “dire” number CBO forecast without its enactment.

So does the White House regard the current jobs situation as “dire”? Of course not. Responding to today’s jobs report, President Biden said “our jobs recovery is going very strong.” And naturally, the White House continues to promise its next trillion-dollar spending plan will “create millions of good-paying jobs,” too.

Americans seem to be seeing right through this rhetoric. A Democratic pollster recently released a memo analyzing voter attitudes in the wake of the Virginia gubernatorial election. An interviewer with The New York Times said one striking finding from the memo was that, in the minds of Americans, “the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which became law in March, may as well not exist.” When it comes to that legislation’s failure so far to create even one of the millions of jobs its supporters promised, they couldn’t be more correct.

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